One Simple Act
by arin
Summary: A short story about a very minor character... and about how nobody is a minor character. Standalone short story.


Author's Note: This story flashes back to the events of Animorphs #29, but the narrator is speaking from post-#54. There won't be a Chapter 2 – this is just a short one, meant to picture frame how much a small kindness can mean. 

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My name is Cynthia Kensington, and I saved the world.

No, really. I'm serious. I had no idea I was saving the world at the time, of course. People very rarely do. But then, that's just the history major in me talking. I've studied some of the world's greatest events, and always thought that the people living through them must've thought it was no big deal. Must've just been going about their daily lives, not knowing how much the world had changed.

Over the last six months, I've come to rethink that theory a lot. Because, y'see, the world has changed, and I lived through it. I saw it happen, and I know that human society will never be the same.

Six months ago, an Andalite Courier ship landed in front of the White House, and several teenagers announced to the planet that they had just saved it's ass big-time. Well, okay, they put it much more /diplomatically/ than that, of course, but the general message was still pretty clear. One of them wasn't even a human teenager, but an Andalite. The first extra-terrestrial species to befriend Earth. 

Not the first species to contact it, though. That honor belonged to the Yeerks. They tried to take us over, first through a slow, silent invasion and then by brute force. But the Animorphs and their Andalites friends had overcome all, and Earth was a free planet. 

Interplanetary tourism didn't start until a couple of months ago. Mostly it's been Andalites. Another species, called Leerans, had attempted one or two visitations, but quickly decided that visiting the human population only led to vast headaches for them. Apparently their species is psychic, and because of that they had evolved to a point where they didn't have a lot of unnecessary thoughts. "Less static," is the way the Leeran Ambassador put it. The overwhelming amount of thoughts occurring on our planet proved to be too much for most of them. They still had a few people visiting our oceans, and they were nice enough to ask permission before they came, but mostly they avoided the human population. 

The Andalites sure didn't, though. They wanted human contact. Lots of it. And they wanted contact with lots of human foods, too. 

I was going to tell you about how I saved the world? 

I was watching a Larry King Live special that was hosting Cassie Godfrey, one of the teenagers who had successfully beaten back the Yeerk invasion of Earth. She was doing the special as part of a lobby to support the Human-Endorsed Yeerk Alliance, or HEYA, which had formed in response to a formal bill in the government demanding that all Yeerks on Earth submit to permanent morphing and relocation, a condition of the Yeerk surrender negotiated during the battle that historians have labeled 'Rachel's Last Stand'. Members of the former Yeerk Peace Movement, which had assisted the Animorphs in the war, were fighting for their rights to keep their Yeerks as partners, complaining that forcing every Yeerk to abandon it's natural body was tantamount to genocide. A lot of points were made about the assistance a Yeerk-enhanced (they prefer "Yeerk-enhanced" to "Yeerk-infested." Never let it be said that political correctness can't be taken to another level) medical or strategy facility could provide to humanity. Extracting patients' medical histories more accurately from their childhood memories, or a Yeerk polygrapher verifying in someone's head that they were, in fact, telling the truth in a court case. According to Cassie, the possibilities were endless. She even suggested that Yeerk infestation could replace the prison system as a humane way to discipline offenders, having a Yeerk mentor demonstrate the proper way to live in society and teaching their host along the way.  

I wasn't sure I was comfortable with all the suggestions. Privacy issues have always been pretty important to me, and from the descriptions I've heard, there's no greater invasion of privacy than having a Yeerk in your head. But she was talking about procedures that she envisioned as voluntary alternatives, not mandates, and that I could respect. If I had to face the choice of years in prison versus having a "supervisor" of sorts in my head, I guess I'd choose the option that let me stay in better contact with my family and friends. Either way, the history major in me was very engrossed in hearing the story, because I knew whatever decision the government made was going to be a landmark one. It was going to shape the way we dealt with other species from that point forward. So I listened intently, grateful to be living in such interesting times.

And that's when she told the story. Larry had asked her how she had come to have such an appreciation for a species that she'd fought for so long, and she told him about a Yeerk named Aftran Nine-Four-Two. And sent my mind racing back in time.

I didn't live in the Animorphs' home state of California. If I had, I might've been made a Controller before the war's end, and that's a pretty scary thought. But I did do some traveling with my parents, including a couple of trips from Seattle to Mexico during the invasion. On one of those trips, we'd pulled into a pretty average-looking town and stopped off at a McDonald's. Just stretching our legs, nabbing some junk food. Nothing really spectacular.

It was a town of lunatics, I was pretty sure about that. Not one, but /two/ adults had actually ordered an item from the kids' menu for themselves. And both told the same stupid joke – they wanted the happy meal with 'extra happy.' I was glad that they'd both gone off to the bathroom, because I didn't want to sit near adults who made jokes that stupid. 

I remember with perfect clarity what I ordered: six piece Chicken McNuggets, an extra-large fries, and a Chocolate-Banana Shake. It's one of the little known secrets of McDonald's that there are always four shake flavors, not three. The three common ones are Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry, of course. The fourth one is always different depending on the season. For St. Patrick's day it's always a green mint shake. For summertime, raspberry. Sometimes I liked them, sometimes I didn't, but I always made a habit out of asking which one they were serving, and Chocolate-Banana happens to be one of the ones I wish they'd add to their regular menu. 

We sat in the front of the restaurant, so that my dad could see the car through the window. It was loaded with most of our worldly possessions, and he's a pretty paranoid guy. Don't blame him, really. He works for the Federal Way Police Department, so he gets a lot of reports about things that happen to cars. If I heard stories like that all day, every day, I'd probably be paranoid, too.

Anyway, there we are, snacking away on overly greasy but really tasty food, when suddenly there's a commotion coming from the bathroom area. A panicked osprey, carrying some strange slug it'd caught, was flying hecticly around the store. It looked pretty banged up, like it's wings had gone through the grill or something. People were going crazy trying to catch it as it fluttered all over the place.

"Poor thing," I announced, getting up out of my seat and moving to the door. The people in the back were shocked and angry, like I was doing a bad thing by letting the bird out, but I wasn't about to let them catch it. Who knows what they'd do with it? Know how they always say there's cat in Chinese food? Well, I didn't want to eat Osprey McNuggets next time I came here!

So I opened the door. And the osprey flew out into the freedom of the day.

The manager was pissed, but then, so was my dad. He said he didn't want to eat in a place where birds-of-prey were probably crapping all over the food. And so we left in a huff. All things considered, I considered the day pretty useless and wasted. 

After hearing Cassie repeat the story on TV, I realized that she was the osprey. And that the slug she'd been holding was Aftran, the first of many Yeerks to take a stand for the rights of human beings. 

"So," Larry suggested, "I guess we owe a lot to the person who opened that door, ey?"

"Absolutely," Cassie agreed. "If that hadn't happened, I'd have died, Aftran would've been recaptured, Ax would've died. Maybe the others would have survived, but we probably wouldn't have won." She looked out at the camera, seemingly directly at me. "Thanks, out there, for being one of the good people in the world."

So like I said, I saved the world. Of course, I didn't come forward and call a press release or anything. Nobody would believe me, and besides, I didn't need credit. But I thought about all the little kindnesses I'd ever done, and all the ripples that they might have had on people everywhere. And I made a promise to myself that I'd never call a day useless again. Because we never have any idea what one useless day, one small act, might mean to people somewhere down the line. 

I knew that now better than anyone.


End file.
